12.31.09 - end of a decade

I haven't really given it much thought that this is the end of the first decade of the 2000's... but maybe i should. 10 years is quite a large amount of time and it's been quite a journey.

I started the decade in college, living in an apartment, doing design and being hipper than the average bear. Lots of travelling to chicago and DC, reading WallPaper, dreaming of working in NYC for some cool internet design firm. Spent the summer at GWU with some other hellyeah kids doing web design. Crashed the smurf mobile and ended up car-less for the last months of college.

Graduated college and stuck around indiana for a bit before moving back to the bay area and being a slacker. Spent a bit of time chasing jobs before settling to work for my uncle's landscape architecture company being their IT and all around tech and design guy. That lasted for a while, but i was restless and decided to go to colorado for a month to intern at a missions place called Caleb Project. It seemed like a good fit and they needed IT help. So I decided that would be the next step... but it required a long journey of raising support. I also met Seana there, so why not pursue the job AND the girl.

back in the bay area i started doing some land surveying type stuff for Unc Ron at the 745 Mt. Home Rd. site... that meant getting up really early, but the benefit was leaving early. Some days that meant coming home and working out... which resulted in me being in the best shape of my life. Some days that meant driving up the penninsula to SF to lead worship at Lumps. Got my Taylor guitar during this time... also kept playing drums and getting better at that. Life had a good rhythm, hanging out with Jimmy led to great adventures, but raising support didn't go very far. What did go far was the relationship with Seana and I ended up proposing to her in the rain at the Yerba Buena gardens after a disappointing hour of looking for parking near the Palace of Fine Arts.

over time, i'd built up enough support to move and at least live in poverty for a while with the hope that the move would be the catalyst for more support. So I moved to Denver and lived with Alex. The nice thing was that Seana moved at the same time, so we spent most of our time discovering denver and just being together.

Eventually we got married and Caleb Project realized that since I had become the only IT staff, they really ought to pay me to stay. Looking back it was a good environment for not doing much and being able to play hooky and go skiing. On the flip side, it caused me to stagnate in a lot of my skills. We had a great church community, but after some falling out, I ended up being the worship director. The nice thing about working in ministry, aside from the flexibility to go skiing, is the flexibility to work as a worship director.

one bit of inflexibility was that I wasn't allowed to leave for any extended period of time... so despite one of Caleb Project's core functions to send short term missions teams abroad, I was unable to travel. Until one day I just decided to do it anyway. So Seana and I went to the UK for a week, then to Spain for 2 weeks. And I realized that international travel was as amazing as I dreamed.

But things didn't last and the church had a second falling out followed shortly by Caleb Project quickly merging with ACMC, then imploding and running out of money. The lesson learned is that while "God's Will" is a good answer in church, it's rarely a good reason to make bad choices in real life. But, maybe it was God's will, since it was clear that many little birds needed to be pushed out of the nest to learn to fly.

And flying is good for me, so I landed at Uncommon Solutions and got back into serious coding. The gauntlet was thrown the first day in the form of 2 coding problems that 2 of the best senior engineers could not solve. And after a frustrating first week of feeling like i wasn't making progress, I managed to solve them.

With the new job came talks of a new house, particularly as our income increased drastically and our rental lease was coming to an end. A few months after settling into the new job, we settled into a new home... that is new to us, since it was built in 1929.

While rebuilding my atrophed coding skills, I also started building my culinary skills, first taking a short class, then going on to become a regular volunteer at the school. Things at Cook St. got weird for a brief period when Chef Matt left and I thought that would be the end for me, since i was "Matt's guy", but Chef John stepped up and has kept me around, first helping with classes and now being a regular commis for most events. That culminated in winning a cooking competition during the school's 10th anniversary event.

Most recently we went to Japan to attend the wedding ceremony of our friends Tio and Hideo. And i specify ceremony, because the two were actually legally married in the states 5 years earlier. And again, the trip made me realize how much I love international travel.

So i've started learning Japanese, I continue to cook and code... and we'll see where those take me over the next 10 years.